Using controlled lightning to clean up contaminated groundwater

In her own words, Badaruddin explains that the would test “the idea that lightning can be harnessed on-site to pyrolyse highly contaminated groundwater [at Cape Canaveral] as an approach to remediate the polluted site.”

In short, her design proposes a new infrastructure of “rocket-triggered lightning technology,” assisted and supervised by a peripheral network of dirigibles—floating airships that “surround the site and serve as the observatory platform for a proposed lightning visitor centre and the weather research center.”

The former was directly inspired by real-world lightning research equipment found at the University of Florida’s Lightning Research Group.